So, as I’m sure you know (!), the large hadron collider (LHC) is going to be starting up again in the next couple of weeks after that disappointing FAIL last year. I feel like they are putting a whole lot of expectations on this thing. I mean, they have spent SO much money to get this thing built, and its so huge (in terms of the space it takes up) and yet it is based on concepts and theories. I admit that my knowledge of whats going on in the LHC is quite sparse so I’m going to assume that they had some very convincing data to get the kind of money they needed to build it in the beginning. I mean, they don’t even know if the Higgs Boson exists but they plan on finding it! I’m going to suspend my judgment and of course give them the benefit of the doubt because I truly want them to find everything they are looking for. What I’m really hoping for is for a stargate to open up right the middle of that thing! That would be awesome!
I also came across this article while reading about the LHC which I find wholly incredible and exciting. In case you don’t feel like reading the article, its about the very real possibility of creating unlimited energy for the world without the toxic waste that comes with electric and nuclear plants. I feel like this should have been figured out a long time ago and it probably would have if greed did not exist. I’m sure that technology in this area has been held back because people have been making way too much money on oil and energy in general. Anyways, this new “National Ignition Facility”, which is in California (high five!) and starts up in 2010 and is also based on a theory (which they must have proven at some point to get the 3.5 billion start up cost). The theory: “scientists will use the world’s most powerful laser to create 192 separate beams of light that will be directed at a bead of frozen hydrogen in a violent burst lasting five billionths of a second…the intense beams produce a powerful shockwave that crunches the fuel pellet at a million miles an hour, generating temperatures of around 100,000,000C. Under such extreme conditions, which are found only in the core of stars, the hydrogen atoms will fuse, producing helium and vast amounts of energy.” Woah.
Emilily 3:25 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink
Okay, this reply is long overdue, but I had to set aside enough time to read all those articles. It’s so important to keep up on the science!
First, the one from The Guardian about the LHC. I think it is amazing they fixed the problem already, I mean, a machine of that scale, with such specific conditions required to work, it’s no wonder it had a few problems! Do you think it is really possible it could create a black hole that will swallow the earth? I also like these guys, they have taken skepticism to a whole new fascinating level: …another group of physicists [who] say the production of Higgs bosons may be so abhorrent to nature that their creation would ripple backwards through time to stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller trying to halt his own birth. Wow! Seriously, if humanity is going to destroy itself, that would be way cooler than slowly poisoning ourselves with our own sewage and pollution.
I followed the link to the Wikipedia article on the Higgs Boson particle, and I’d just like to say, way to go Wikipedia, every link in that article led to another article that made even less sense than the first, like one of those Russian nesting dolls of obscure physics theories. In order to understand the God Particle, I had to read about scalar physics, which is “distinguished by its invariance under a Lorentz transformation, hence the name “scalar,” in contrast to a vector or tensor field. The quanta of the quantized scalar field are spin-zero particles, and as such are bosons.” I cannot even remember what I was originally reading about, but I did learn a new word! Quanta-the minimum unit of any physical entity involved in an interaction, and an entity is quantized when it is reduced to this minimum. I can’t use it in a sentence, but I feel like at least I have prevented one small fraction of this information from flying right over my head.
I am sure this article about the National Ignition Facility and a potential clean, unlimited energy source is fascinating, but the time-bending dark-matter-spawning particle accelerator is a tough act to follow. Although, you make a good point about why haven’t we figured this out already – maybe if everyone weren’t focused on fixing the 60 billion dollar short-circuit at CERN, or manufacturing cars that have 3 rows of seats and DVD players instead of electric engines, we would have made some more progress on this by now.
Carmen 3:51 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink
Well, I hate to inundate you with even more information but another article regarding this so-called Higgs and its abhorrent nature which makes people want to time travel came out in the NYTimes – Collider article
This will clear things up a little about the time traveling bit.
I don’t know what you said about scalar and quanta-thes but it sounds good to me! And about black holes – yes, apparently black holes are being formed all the time so need to worry about them swallowing the planet. And if that should happen it will be super exciting! Looking forward to it!
Emilily 4:50 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink
That was AWESOME!!! Forces from the future are coming back to thwart the LHR!?! I was semi-mocking the whole idea in my last reply, but I have to say, once I learned this Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen is one of the founders of String Theory and a widely respected physicist (although I think they used the term “deep thinker” rather than “physicist” but same difference)…well, I can only say, this feeling is similar to what a 9-yr-old might experience if they suddenly found out that Santa Claus really did exist, after all.
Carmen 5:35 pm on November 10, 2009 Permalink
yeah, i can’t wait for Christmas (the collider to start up)!